The Affiliate Tracking Tool Landscape
The many-headed hydra of affiliate friction points...
The affiliate ecosystem is fragmented and fraught with friction. How’s that for alliteration?
For years I struggled with getting even a basic level of visibility on my disparate affiliate earnings.
Once I got past 5 networks, 3+ sites and 20+ affiliate programs… things got really messy.
Back in 2017, there were not a lot of great options, but I signed up for Affluent (now part of Impact and no longer publisher facing). This was a game changer!
Suddenly I could see daily overviews of earnings across networks, sites, and programs. It wasn’t perfect, but it as a LOT better (in near real-time too).
Since then, a slew of really exciting things have happened. And still are happening.
The Multi-Headed Affiliate Hydra
There are actually many discrete problems here. This may be partly why a good comprehensive tools suite has yet to emerge.
Here’s are the ecosystem challenges I see:
Brand Discovery: Just finding a good offer, let alone the best in-niche offer is far too time consuming for most creators and publishers. This generally involves logging into each platform and checking for offers OR googling “brand name” + “affiliate” (lots of spam and false positives here - calling out FlexOffers). Aside: A short cut I use is Skimlinks as they tend to have the MOST offers under one roof. I covered “Why I Start with Skimlinks” in a previous issue.
Partner Discovery: On the flipside, brands and affiliate agencies can struggle to find the best partners for their brands, with the highest probability of driving meaningful RoAS. Tools like Publisher Discovery exist, but more could be done here to surface publishers and influencers.
Affiliate Link Building: Easily building links just by itself is a huge challenge. Most of the time it takes multiple windows, logins, and “copy paste” to build one effective link. Commission Junction, Amazon Associates, and others have some nice quick browser builders, but these are only platform specific. Affilimate is rolling out a universal link builder and I know of other companies working on this challenge. Side Note: having a one stop location to build links is great, but then there’s also the in-app challenge for WordPress users, YouTube influencers, TikTok, Socials, etc.. and maybe even Newsletter creators.
Affiliate Link Management: Once you have dozens of offers, landing pages, and placements, link maintenance becomes a real challenge. Tools like Lasso do a decent job of identifying broken links and problematic stock (out of stock), but identifying under-optimized our OOS links on merchant pages is still very uneven. Each affiliate network has some sort of broken link report, but with varying levels of usability and visibility.
Unified Affiliate Dashboards: Simply seeing all of your affiliate earnings in once place is harder than it sounds. Tools like Affilimate, Trackonomics, and Lasso Performance try to solve this basic problem. One of the key continuing issues here is the integration of ALL the affiliate networks and bespoke setups. There’s still usually a gap for most publishers of 20-30% (e.g. a specific brand with inhouse custom affiliate tech).
Link Performance Measurement: Getting data in one view is nice, but understanding which links are driving what results is even better. The best affiliate tools provide insights and help tell story. This is useful internally and also helpful for communicating progress to brand partners. Affilimate even offers heat map tracking (no easy feat).
CTA Design: Creating elegant and functional CTAs is a fairly large pain point for publishers. This is one of the original reasons I started using Lasso.
CPA Rate Optimization: This could look something like the emerging 2nd Tier Amazon affiliate tech I discussed in an earlier newsletter, but more broadly is about getting publishers the best possible commission on their traffic. In the same network, one publisher might be at 2% commission while another is at 15% (usually because they asked or negotiated this). There’s clearly extra margin to squeeze and most affiliates have no real way of knowing what to ask for.
Split Testing: The smallest design changes can make significant impacts. It follows that affiliate tools that enable split testing of colors, link locations and CTA verbiage are in great supply. Surprisingly, there are not many tools that easily offer this out of the box!
Link Scheduling: Sometimes you only want a link to be live for a specific period of time. A prime use case is Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Currently, there are not any great native publisher tools for this.
Popup Functionality: Popups are generally annoying, but there’s still some great use cases and times where they make sense for publishers. There’s legacy tools like OptinMonster, HelloBar, and the like, but these are more general purpose, NOT specifically built for affiliate offers.
Link Personalization: This could be as simple as geographic localization, but with the larger trend of personalization in ecommerce, I see an emerging need here for an ability to share personalized offers based on session tracking information.
Some Tools & Platforms I’m Watching
It’s clearly an exciting time to be alive in this ecosystem. These are some of the top tools and platforms I’m watching, using, or testing in the space:
Lasso: We’ve been longtime users and early adopters of Lasso. It’s the most complete affiliate link monetization stacks currently on the market. They’ve already tackled CTAs, link management, out of stock / broken links, and tables problems. They’ve also recently launched Revenue Analytics, which is looking good so far but still a step behind some of the analytics-first platforms.
Affilimate: We’ve been using Affilimate for the last few years, switching over from Affluent.io when they were acquired. Affilimate is tackling the analytics, reporting, data intelligence and revenue tracking components FIRST, but seem to gradually getting into the link building side. It’s not a 100% data solution as some links and networks are really hard to integrate, but it’s the closest I’ve come to 100% (probably about 80% revenue attribution for us). Read my full review, for more details.
Affiliate.com: Formerly DataFeedr, this team is doing big things around simplified product discovery, link building, and link management! They are still in a soft relaunch of sorts, but I’m excited to see where they go.
GeniusLink: Jesse Lake is one of the OG pioneers of affiliate tools and I used Genius YEARS ago when it was just a geo-targeting platform. It’s still a great stack and offers some unique “Customer Choice” pages to support multi-vendor affiliate links.
FMTC: FMTC is part directory, part tech, part database of ALL of the affiliate programs and affiliate agencies in the ecosystem. They do have a link building tool for “universal link building” without having to log into each network, but are best know for their deal feed technology. Useful for deals sites and deals sections of websites. I personally like FMTC for identifying up to date agency contact information and just as a simple searchable database for affiliate offers.
Impact (Trackonomics): Impact acquired Trackonomics a few years back as part of their “eat the affiliate world” strategy. Their target market is larger publishers looking for comprehensive (and customized) data solutions like a Recurrent Ventures. There’s no doubt they have the deepest capabilities, but the price point is out of reach for many small to mid sized publishers.
Strackr: Affiliate analytics dashboard, I don’t currently used them but have demo’d a few times.
Affluent.io: I used to use Affluent, then they were acquired by Impact and seemed to be focusing more as a service for AGENCIES to track their internal affiliates vs for publishers as a stand-alone. This is likely because Impact also owns Trackonomics, which appears more publisher focused.
WeCanTrack: Not very familiar with them, but appears to be a simple dashboard analytics tool. As Affilimate, Lasso and others broaden their product offerings, I actually expect some of these hyper specific tools to do well for if they can deliver on ONE problem, really well at an affordable cost.
Affiliate Marketing Reads
PartnerStack released their 2023 SaaS Partnership Award nominees this year. Always interesting to see which brands are making performance marketing work.
I’ve been digging into Levanta.io as part of my dive into Amazon second-tier affiliate networks and this case study is a great showcase of why these networks see such an opening in the performance ecosystem.
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That’s it for this update!